How far have we come in standing up to prejudice?

Why we still have a long way to go

By Chandler Walter, Assistant Editor

The other day, I was watching an old movie called 12 Angry Men. It was filmed in 1957 and is in black and white. Now I’m not trying to come off as some sort of “vintage film lover,” or what have you, but I make the point because the age of the movie matters here.

The plot of the movie centres around, well, 12 rather angry men. They are members of a jury (spoiler alert) whose task it is to decide the verdict on the murder trial of an 18-year-old boy. The boy is born from the slums, and all the evidence seems to point to guilty. Slowly but surely, the jurors are convinced otherwise through logic and reasoning, until only a few holdouts remain on the “guilty” side of the ballot. One of whom being Juror 10 (Ed Begley), who, in the last quarter of the movie, launched into his explanation for why he believed the boy to be guilty of murder.

His reasoning is that anyone who grew up in a slum is dangerous, and that prejudice outweighed any of the other arguments, in his mind. “Well, don’t you know about them? There’s a… There’s a danger here. These people are dangerous. They’re… wild. Listen to me. Listen to me,” he said, standing at the table, while all of the other jurors stood up one by one, and turned their backs to the ranting man until he eventually sat down, defeated by silence.

As I watched that almost 60-year-old scene, I couldn’t help but be reminded by Juror 10 of a certain businessman south of the border. The fear mongering, the blanket statements about certain types of people, and the constant and repeated pleas to be listened to all rang alarming bells of familiarity.

The amazing thing to me was that a group of white men in a fictional scene 60 years ago could see those words for what they were: Prejudice, racism, and utterly wrong. They stood up, turned their backs, and did not give him the time of day. They did not feed into his hate, or fuel it further by allowing themselves to be convinced of his nonsense. They stifled the raging man to the point where he realized the error of his views, and quietly conceded to himself that maybe there was more to the decision of a young man’s life than the juror’s own preconceived ideas about the accused.

After Juror 10 sat down, Juror 8 (Henry Fonda) responded with something that still rings true 60 long years later: “It’s always difficult to keep personal prejudice out of a thing like this. Wherever you run into it, prejudice always obscures the truth.”

If you haven’t seen the movie, watch it. It’s an amazing movie and only runs for about an hour and a half. Enjoy the great acting, feel good about yourself for watching a black and white movie, and see for yourself if Juror 10 sparks a feeling of familiarity in you as well. He sure did for me, and that made me very, very frightened for our neighbours south of the border.